Discovery of associative patterns between workplace sound level and physiological wellbeing using wearable devices and empirical Bayes modeling

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Issue Date
2023-01-13Author
Srinivasan, Karthik
Currim, Faiz
Lindberg, Casey M.
Razjouyan, Javad
Gilligan, Brian
Lee, Hyoki
Canada, Kelli J.
Goebel, Nicole
Mehl, Matthias R.
Lunden, Melissa M.
Heerwagen, Judith
Najafi, Bijan
Sternberg, Esther M.
Kampschroer, Kevin
Ram, Sudha
Publisher
Nature Research
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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Show full item recordAbstract
We conducted a field study using multiple wearable devices on 231 federal office workers to assess the impact of the indoor environment on individual wellbeing. Past research has established that the workplace environment is closely tied to an individual’s wellbeing. Since sound is the most-reported environmental factor causing stress and discomfort, we focus on quantifying its association with physiological wellbeing. Physiological wellbeing is represented as a latent variable in an empirical Bayes model with heart rate variability measures—SDNN and normalized-HF as the observed outcomes and with exogenous factors including sound level as inputs. We find that an individual’s physiological wellbeing is optimal when sound level in the workplace is at 50 dBA. At lower (<50dBA) and higher (>50dBA) amplitude ranges, a 10 dBA increase in sound level is related to a 5.4% increase and 1.9% decrease in physiological wellbeing respectively. Age, body-mass-index, high blood pressure, anxiety, and computer use intensive work are person-level factors contributing to heterogeneity in the sound-wellbeing association.
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Citation
Srinivasan, K., Currim, F., Lindberg, C.M. et al. Discovery of associative patterns between workplace sound level and physiological wellbeing using wearable devices and empirical Bayes modeling. npj Digit. Med. 6, 5 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00727-1
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